About Naomi Kashiwagi

Naomi Kashiwagi is an award-winning artist living in Manchester and has shown work across the UK and internationally. In 2016, she was awarded a place on the Clore Emerging Leaders course and received the Clore Independent Artist Bursary. Naomi was long listed for the Dazed and Converse Emerging Artist Award 2015. In 2013 Naomi was shortlisted for the Women in the Arts Award; part of Manchester's International Women's Day Celebrations. She won both Arts Council North West prize, art08 Individual Artist Award and Best of Manchester Award (Art) in 2008. Naomi and was shortlisted for the Nationwide Mercury Prize Art competition in 2005.
Notable exhibitions and performances include Inside Out, K11 art village, Wuhan, China (part of the 2015 UK-China Year of Cultural Exchange, Playtime, Cornerhouse, Manchester (2014) - New commissioned works for the exhibition, Swingtime and Puffin Crossing Carousel , performing Gramophonica at Canada’s leading gallery for contemporary art, The Power Plant, Toronto for the Power Ball 2014, Innsbruck International: Festival of the Arts (2013), SOUNDWORKS, ICA, London (2012), Progress Reports: Art in an era of diversity, INIVA, Rivington Place London (2010), The Intertwining Line: Drawing as Subversive Art, Cornerhouse, Manchester (2008), Wind-Up, Barbican, London (2008). Naomi’s work is in the Whitworth’s collection.Her work is published in the book, Drawing Now: Between the Lines of Contemporary Art (2007)

Naomi Kashiwagi is an award-winning artist living in Manchester and has shown work across the UK and internationally. Kashiwagi produces sound works, installations, performances and works on paper, that draw upon her cultural heritage, an intrinsic fusion of two cultures, British and Japanese. Drawing is central to Kashiwagi’s practice and she makes drawings using a range of media including diamonds, typewriters, gramophones and pianos, as well as graphite and pen.

Kashiwagi won both Arts Council North West prize, art08 Individual Artist Award and Best of Manchester Award (Art) in 2008. In 2013 she was shortlisted for the Women in the Arts Award; part of Manchester’s International Women’s Day Celebrations and was shortlisted for the Nationwide Mercury Prize Art competition in 2005.

Naomi Kashiwagi works through reinvention and integrates poetic rituals into everyday life to reveal and reimagine the innate curiosities and enchantments of the everyday. Her work examines the complexities of the everyday, the poetics qualities and potential for inventiveness in everyday life that contribute to an inquisitive quest for reclaiming the everyday.

Kashiwagi’s practice playfully provokes the fringes of disciplines and genres, the intersections and impacts of visual art, music and everyday life upon one another and the cyclical nature of obsolescence and technological innovation. She explores the potential of things beyond their prescribed uses by poetically transforming their utilitarian and conceptual function.

Notable exhibitions and performances include Inside Out, K11 art village, Wuhan, China (part of the 2015 UK-China Year of Cultural Exchange, Playtime, Cornerhouse, Manchester (2014) – New commissioned works for the exhibition, Swingtime and Puffin Crossing Carousel , performing Gramophonica at Canada’s leading gallery for contemporary art, The Power Plant, Toronto for the Power Ball 2014, Innsbruck International: Festival of the Arts (2013), SOUNDWORKS, ICA, London (2012), Progress Reports: Art in an era of diversity, INIVA, Rivington Place London (2010), The Intertwining Line: Drawing as Subversive Art, Cornerhouse, Manchester (2008), Wind-Up, Barbican, London (2008). Kashiwagi’s work is also in the Whitworth Art Gallery’s collection.

Naomi Kashiwagi studied BA Fine Art (2004) and won an Erasmus Scholarship to study for 3 months at The Academy of Fine Arts in Venice in 2003. In 2005 she studied MA Fine Art at Manchester School of Art (MMU)and spent a month studying at Tokyo University of Art and Music. In 2007 Kashiwagi studied MA Art Gallery and Museum Studies at the University of Manchester.

Articles with Naomi Kashiwagi

Naomi Kashiwagi is an award-winning artist who produces sound works, installations, performances and works on paper, that draw upon her cultural heritage, an intrinsic fusion of two cultures, British and Japanese. Drawing is central to Kashiwagi’s practice and she makes drawings using a range of media including diamonds, typewriters, gramophones and pianos, as well as graphite and pen.